Nardene talks of her motivations for starting VET and progressing into Higher Education (2:45)

What are your motivations for study?

Well, because I wanted to be like more than just a stay-at-home mum, that was my motivation, like Cert IV. But as I’ve gotten Higher Ed, I’ve found there’s like a lot of opportunities that are open to Indigenous people and like helping Indigenous people. And I – and like, that’s my motivation now, is that I’d like to get at a certain level of my education so I can go out there and I can help people, yeah, to get where I am or just have a little bit of more quality of life, yeah, so that, yeah, stereotyping of Aboriginal people is like broken down a little bit.

Yeah, I’d like to have, yeah, something, yeah, to do with like breaking it down the stereotyping and like showing non-Indigenous people that, you know, not all of us don’t – we don’t want to learn and we just want to sit around and be a nobody. Yeah, I want to break that stereotype and show people that yeah, here I’ve done it.  That’s not what Aboriginal people are like and I would like Aboriginal people to say, ‘Oh, you know, okay, I can go like start my own business’. Yeah, there’s going to be people like me, Indigenous people that have a business educational background that can go and help people, Aboriginal people, to start their own businesses.  So yeah, that’s my motivation now. 

Yeah at first it was just out of boredom and I wanted to be something more but didn’t know what.  But now I’m studying and doing my degree, yeah I know where I want to be. So I want to yeah, break down the stereotype of Indigenous people and show them that they can get where I am now. Or I can go out there and I can assist them to be something more than, you know, sitting around and just show like non-Indigenous people and people of other cultures that that’s not what Indigenous people do and they don’t want to do that.

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